Yesterday afternoon I was pouring through my collection of Indian cookery books looking for something different to do with a chicken breast languishing in my fridge. As often happens on these occasions, after ten minutes or so of not finding quite what I was looking for, I was about to revert to my trusty old Madhur Jaffrey butter chicken when a piece of paper being used as a bookmark caught my attention. Frayed and food-stained, it turned out to contain a barely legible biro-scrawled recipe for a chicken curry. After further examination, I noted that it contained some unusual culinary bedfellows for an Indian chicken dish – things like olive oil, ground caraway seed, lime juice, and most particularly, both bay and curry leaves. Then suddenly I remembered a swelteringly hot and sticky afternoon spent in a hotel kitchen in southern India in the autumn of 2003.

We were guests at the aptly named Ideal Beach Hotel, in Mahabalipuram, on India’s Tamil coast, resting up for a few days before travelling inland to Coimbatore (where my wife Dido was to help in the establishment of a clinical education centre for children with autism).

I think it was on our first evening there, during supper, we got chatting with a very affable American couple at the next table who turned out to share our enthusiasm for the delicious local cuisine. At some point during the meal the four of us were invited by the maître d to visit the kitchen the following lunchtime to watch our food being prepared. Cathy – the lady of the American couple and a veteran of the Ideal Beach Hotel – chose the menu, including the lime chicken curry which turned out to be as delicious as it was unusual.

The rare blend of ingredients and spices was explained by the fact that our young head chef, although a Tamil, had been trained in Bengal and enjoyed fusing the two distinct culinary traditions.

Cathy, Richard, Dido and yours truly enjoying our curry lunch

Fortunately Dido had the presence of mind to record the preparation of the curry and – albeit thirteen years late – I was able to decipher the recipe and apply it to the chicken breast in my fridge. And, it was absolutely delicious! The caraway, lime, bay and curry leaf are a group marriage made in heaven – a complex and unctuous harmony of savoury, fragrant bitter sweetness that transforms humble white chicken meat into a thing of olfactory delight.

There are two ways to sample this fabulous curry – either follow the recipe below, or better still, go and visit the Ideal Beach Hotel. I can recommend both.

(Chapatis and a hot lime pickle are excellent with this curry also, if using fresh curry leaves, add at the same time as the lime juice.)

In the decades since that wonderful night and thrilling morning-after I have returned to these images many times, in different media; from charcoal and coloured inks, to pastels, oils and most successfully – from a commercial standpoint – in gouache. In fact, it was the gouache originals that inspired the pictures in that earlier post.

However, I’ve long thought that a Matisse-esque, colour block / cut-out technique would most suit this subject – an uninhibited French inspired method for an uninhibited French subject.

After many long hours of honing my Photoshop skills I think I’ve achieved my aim of making fun, jazzy and – in this case at least – sexy images. The several people who have seen them in preview have universally approved and now I’d be most interested to know what you, my followers and other viewers make of them?

I am an artist, illustrator and author. I trained at St. Martins School of Art and exhibited regularly in the UK and abroad throughout the 1980s. My illustration highpoint was designing the cover for the UK paperback edition of the novel, Billy Bathgate. I lived in Israel in 1970 and then again from 2009 until 2012. I currently divide my time between London and southern Spain where I continue to work as an artist, as well as make Moscatel wine. My first book, King Saul – The True History of the First Messiah was published to critical acclaim in 2007. In 2014 I published my first novel - ARK (previously, The Sons of Kohath).

Fr. Justin Belitz OFM is the founder of the Franciscan Hermitage and author of "Success: Full Living," "Success: Full Thinking," & "Success: Full Relating." His teachings incorporate spirituality, science, and art for personal growth and development.